Abstract

In a relational database, a candidate key is defined as a set of attributes that is distinct the database rows. The determining process of a candidate key could affect the database performance and optimization. In this paper, an algorithm based on N×M Boolean matrix is proposed to automate the process of candidate key generation for both single and composite attributes based on a functional dependency set, as well as it has the ability to add a new functional dependency attributes as required based on a proved theorem. Results showed that the proposed algorithm can be easily implemented and used in practice. It can be easily expanded to solve N-Level composite attributes set.
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